The nine young men who now face criminal charges in connection with the alleged theft of final exams from Hanover High School represent only a fraction of a wider group - including dozens of students - who may have reviewed copies of the stolen tests or used the answers to cheat, according to a recently completed police investigation.

As few as 44 and as many as 60 students may have had a role in a cheating scandal that has roiled the community and raised questions about whether academic dishonesty is common at Hanover High, according to records of the police investigation.

About 750 students attend Hanover High, which sits close to Dartmouth College. It is known as one of the best public high schools in the state and has a track record of sending graduates to prestigious colleges and universities.

The alleged cheating incidents, which the police say took place in June during finals, led to misdemeanor charges against nine students, who were juniors at the time, for their roles in two alleged test thefts. However, students interviewed by the police said those were far from the first instances of cheating at Hanover High, and that the Class of 2008 was not the only class to participate.

Student Hiroki Podjuban, who has been charged with criminal trespass in the case, told the police, "It was known that other students had stolen exams from the school at different times during the year," the report said. Podjuban denied being involved in the earlier thefts.

Another student, who the police said was "criminally implicated" in the investigation but is being treated as a juvenile because he was 16 at the time of the alleged theft, told the police that he and other students (whom the police records do not name) had used other stolen exams to cheat in April and that "cheating with stolen tests was 'huge' with (last year's) seniors," stated the report by Hanover Police investigator Capt. Frank Moran.

Dresden School District Superintendent Wayne Gersen said he had reviewed police files on the investigation but couldn't verify reports of widespread cheating because the school had not yet begun its own investigation into the matter.

"There's a hazard in putting numbers out there, because they could turn out to be too low and they could turn out to be too high," Gersen said. "Our intention is to pursue vigorously any and all leads we get on cheating, as we always do."

Four students face criminal trespass charges for allegedly using stolen teacher keys to take a chemistry final exam from locked filing cabinets last June. The police have charged five more students with "criminal liability for the conduct of another" for allegedly serving as "lookouts" during the theft of math exams a few days earlier.

But records of the police investigation also list dozens of other students who may have received the stolen tests, helped to calculate answers to the exam questions or used those answers in an attempt to improve their grades. Not all of them, it appears, were in the Class of 2008, since the records list a number of students who were 15 at the time of the alleged cheating.

Combined with the list of students already charged in connection with the alleged cheating scheme, that group includes a broad spectrum of Hanover High's student body, including athletes, children of prominent parents, and "smart kids" who had no problems getting good grades without ill-gotten aid. And while the nine students charged with crimes are all male, the broader group includes a significant number of female students. (The Valley News is not naming in this article the students who were not criminally charged.) Based on his interviews with the 10 criminal suspects and two other students, Moran identified 33 students as "participants" who were not involved in stealing tests but may have played a role in handling or using them, records show. However, some of the students questioned by the police - including one not facing any criminal charges - set the number of "participants" significantly higher.

According to the police report, Podjuban gave Moran a list of 47 names of students allegedly involved in cheating. Student Peter Miller, one of the alleged "lookouts," said 45 to 50 students were involved in cheating on the math tests alone. Student Nicholas Kenyon, another alleged lookout, said he believed 60 had cheated on the exams - a figure repeated by another student, also interviewed by the police, who ultimately was not charged.

It is not clear how students arrived at those estimates.

An eleventh student, who admitted to waiting outside the high school while the chemistry exam was stolen on June 18, was listed in the police report as a "suspect" - with the other 10 who the police said were criminally implicated - but was never charged.

Gersen said high school officials had received the lists, along with other information from the investigation, from the Hanover Police Department. In August, Hanover High School Principal Deb Gillespie sent an e-mail to the parents of students identified in the report, alerting them that school officials "may be meeting with you and your son/daughter."

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